We've just shipped the biggest update to Sites For Scouts so far.
Your website now has a public calendar
Visitors to your site can finally see that your unit is active, without you giving away anything private.
- There's a new Calendar page on your public website listing the next 12 dates you've chosen to share. It shows only the name and the date. Locations, times, costs, sign-ups and rosters always stay behind the member login.
- Nothing appears there until you say so. When you add or edit an event, or edit a trip's details, there's a new Show to Public checkbox. It's off by default.
- The next three shared dates also appear in an Upcoming adventures section on your homepage.
Cub Scout Packs are now fully supported
Sites For Scouts is no longer troop-only.
- Set your Unit Type under Settings → Unit Details and the whole site follows, headings, page copy, help text and the subject line of balance emails all say "Pack" instead of "Troop".
- New Pack sites start with the right leadership titles (Cubmaster, Den Leader, Pack Committee Chair, and so on) instead of troop titles you'd have to delete.
- Changing your unit type or number now updates your site's name automatically. It used to be locked in at signup.
A guided editor for your public pages
You no longer need to be a web person to make your site look like your unit.
- Settings → Homepage is now a step-by-step editor with a live preview beside it. Choose a hero photo (or upload a full uncropped banner), write a welcome message, add a photo, optionally add a quote from your leadership. Nothing goes public until you press Publish.
- Settings → About Page has the same guided treatment, plus a simple on/off switch for the whole page. Meeting details, gallery photos and links fill themselves in.
- Settings → Site Appearance brings your logo, shared page banner, footer text and social links together in one place, with a site-wide preview. It also shows a menu status list, every public page with "Shown" or "Hidden" beside it and the reason why.
- Your public Leaders and Contact pages have been rebuilt and now fill themselves in from your roster and your published contact details.
Photos are much easier to work with
- Page photos now accept files up to 5 MB (was 2 MB), and large photos are automatically resized and re-saved in a lighter format.
- Gallery uploads now show a row per photo with a thumbnail, a progress bar and a clear Uploaded/Failed result. Photos are shrunk in your browser before sending, so a big phone photo uploads in a fraction of the time.
- Photos taken on a phone no longer come out sideways.
- Fixed: in the gallery, opening one photo, closing it, then opening another and deleting could delete the wrong photo. Also, a photo you'd just uploaded couldn't be deleted until you reloaded. Both fixed.
Download a scout's transaction history
- Open a scout's account under Finances → Scout Accounts, click Actions → Export Transactions, and you get a spreadsheet that opens in Excel or Google Sheets. Optional From/To dates, oldest-or-newest-first, and an optional column showing who recorded each transaction.
Guest families can now be managed
- A Show Guests filter on the Scout Accounts list brings guest families into view.
- Remove Guest from Unit ends their access to all your outings, disconnects the family and removes their login, but only when their balance is exactly zero and they're not mid-outing.
- An Orphaned Guest Users panel lists leftover guest logins from before this existed, so you can tidy them up.
Calendar and trip improvements
- Type times instead of scrolling a picker. Type 9:30 or even 930 and tap AM/PM. Much faster on a phone.
- Separate start and end date boxes, and the end date won't let you pick a day before the start.
- Saving an event now jumps the calendar to the month that event lands in, no more wondering whether it saved.
- The Agenda view used to stop after 90 days. It now shows everything upcoming.
- Fixed: ticking "All Day" after typing an invalid time made Save do nothing at all.
- Fixed: multi-day trips shared publicly no longer vanish from the public calendar the moment they depart, they stay until the return date.
- Editing trip details now replaces the details panel instead of showing every field twice.
- The roster visibility choice now reads "Show to All Members" / "Show to Managers Only" instead of the confusing "Hide from Non-Managers". Nothing about who can see rosters changed, only the labels.
- Fixed: the outing sign-up form now clears itself each time it opens, instead of keeping leftover "New Person" rows.
Other fixes worth knowing about
- Fixed: the Publish button on resources did nothing for everyone except our own staff. Unit admins and leaders with resource permission can publish again.
- Fixed: contact form submissions, "tell your leader" emails and CSV downloads were silently redirecting to the homepage for anyone who wasn't network staff, in practice, every admin, leader and parent. All working again.
- Fixed: sign-in failed for accounts whose password contains an apostrophe or backslash.
- Fixed: trial and renewal dates were shown in a universal time zone and could display the wrong day. They now use your site's time zone.
- Scout account pages and private unit pages are now hidden from search engines. Your home, about, contact and public resources pages are unaffected.
- If you subscribe during your free trial, you keep the remaining trial days instead of losing them (as long as more than 48 hours remain).